So this job isn't hard enough...and lately, my friends, it has been 'nads to the wall kinda hard...now we're in the personal assessment and development plan part of the year. oh. yay.

So, have done the long, long secret divining all aspects of your personality test and shocker, they nailed me -- everything the little report says is true, true, true. Too pragmatic, too goal-focused, too self-reliant, struggle with authority, struggle with conformity, struggle with organization. On the other hand, matched up against job qualifications, which they did on a handy dandy chart, I should excel in this job. Whew, sure doesn't FEEL like it!

I'd like to be less of an open book. Everyone else was all shocked and disputing parts of their report...I'm sitting there thinking, gee, that's eerie, how it matches what I would have guessed as my strengths and weaknesses. I don't know if that makes me self-aware. It certainly sounds like yet another obnoxious trait. The biggest surprise I had was that I'm very social. Erk? Well, I guess I already get my fill, since I crave a deserted island, a deep cave (with electricity) an isolated mountaintop.

I'd like to be more suprising, more subtle. It's annoying to look at the description of your astrological sign and think...sigh, okay, ya got me, but I really don't like the color yellow or orange.

And now I'm supposed to come with a personal development plan to become a more creative and strategic thinker. Sure, my boss couldn't pick a slam-dunk like "be more organized"...no, he's got to go for something vague, ill-defined, hard to quantify and measure. Sigh.

Personally, becoming more handy with firearms sounds like a better goal for me.

Oh the Agony!!

At least you didn't have to take a one hour, online, mandatory computer based training on how the new changes for your performance appraisals will be handled in the future. I just went through that this past week as the powers to be have decided that we all need to have more input into how we are rated, to the point where we will be telling them what we should be doing and how they (our supervisors) should rate all of us govies. And I still have another two hours of training (classroom) yet to be conducted!

So I will tell them that they should leave me alone, let me do my work, and always give me a 150% percent rating combined with an equivelant pay bonus cause I'm just that gud....er good! :-)

At my current dayjob, I don't get bennies--basically I'm a glorified hourly temp. But one of the unnamed benefits, one I prize greatly, is that I do not have come up with personal business plans and personal business commitments and such. Instead, I just work. And they give me money.

Is this representative of corporate America these days? I stepped off the Carousel of Ennui in 2002, and reading your post, I'm getting vertigo. They're violating an unspoken but essential social contract. Work-for-hire means, as giantsloth so pithily put it: I work, and you pay me. You don't force me to bond with my cubemates through some daft team-building exercise, you don't scan my pee to see if I'm smoking at home, and the space between my ears remains my property, sole and entire. Sweet smoking Jesus. If they spent as much time thinking about business as they do organizing this crap, the Dow Jones might not drop 200 points every time I blink.